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It’s Cold Out, Baby
All of a sudden, the trees are bare. Their wealth of green leaves have briefly turned the colours of the rainbow, and then their autumn mantle has disappeared and they line the streets and pathways, a hazard for those areas where rain has plastered them to the ground and made their surfaces a slippery danger for the unwary. The weather has changed, and the temperature dropped into single figures (centigrade, for those using outdated measuring systems). Winter is staring us in the face, challenging us to fight it for a last few moments of sun and warmth before the frost coats our lawns and, perhaps, snows fall and obliterate everything.…
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Cybercrime: Defrosting and the Internet of Things
It was only a matter of time before someone, somewhere, contemplating their abilities for cybercrime, found the link between the Internet of Things, the linking of household and other machines to the internet, and a way to control or impede. There have been countless examples of people, across all branches and forms of social media, asking why their toaster, their washing machine, their refrigerator needs to be connected to the internet, why it needs to be available for software updates. A toaster is designed to toast bread, it has various levels of burning, a timer for the appropriate moment, and a mechanism to shoot the completed article out. A washing…
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Literacy and Reading: The Path Least Trodden
There are, we are told, more books being published and bought than at any other time in modern history. A positive flood of new works appear throughout the world practically every day, and the competitive literary marketplace has become a fighting ground, vital with literary supremacy as much as with an ever increasing amount of low-grade slop from Artificial Intelligence compilers. On the one side this is to be greeted, while on the other the question arises over who exactly is writing and buying all these new works? The answer to the first part of this question is simple: there is a wealth of talent either entering or already within…
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Politics: Attributing Blame, Ignoring Solutions
The mass demonstrations across Germany on Saturday, 31 October 2026 have not gone without notice. The presence of tens of thousands of young demonstrators across the country have excited comment and attention through a very broad spectrum of the public and in politics, but not necessarily for the right reasons. The mass media, eager for a good selling story, but without wishing the hard work involved in research and of reporting the background to the demonstrations, has concentrated on the few outbreaks of violence around the periphery of some of the marches. It is this side of the many events which has garnered headlines, and been taken up by those…
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The Enticement of Language Imagery
When I was young, admittedly many years ago, imagination was still A Thing. As a child, and then a young adult, we were called upon to use our imagination in order to play, to learn, to visualise anything which didn’t seem clear to us at first glance. The exhortation to use your imagination was part of daily language usage, and mostly came from those people around me who, through perhaps no fault of their own, were unable to gift enough time to explain something, or suffered a lack of understanding themselves. As a child, of course, imagination was part and parcel of being a child. The cardboard box as a…
